


Ecstasies

by lulahbelle



Category: Poets RPF, Total Eclipse (1995)
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-19
Updated: 2012-10-19
Packaged: 2017-11-16 15:00:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/540720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulahbelle/pseuds/lulahbelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur attempts to control his own destiny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2007. This being a three chapter fic based on the film Total Eclipse which stars Leonardo DiCaprio/David Thewlis about the relationship between French poets Arthur Rimbaud/Paul Verlaine. 
> 
> As much as I've read about the real life historical figures the film sticks seems to stick relatively close to their real life characters so I spose this could be classed as RPF too if you chose to read it that way.
> 
> It's a bit meandering and muddled.
> 
> Rimbaud is not underage where I am but maybe he is where you are.

As soon as he woke he placed his face somewhere where his mother could not see it. 

Sometimes, spirited, he would make his way to the dry clay mud tracks that would lead far away, but most of the time, like today, he was content to escape to somewhere closer.

Their barn had been a makeshift school room for the boy and his brother back when their mother had taught them language. 

There his studious past awakened within the present and soon, the middle of a discarded desk growing too small for him, contained a sheet of poetry and a depleted ink well.

The humours responsible for his writing were still young, carelessly liquid words had fountained from them. 

Still as he turned his pointed face down to hover closely over this page of words he narrowed already slim eyes at the pores clogged with ink with displeasure.

There was some underlying souring to his spring that was not wily enough to escape uncounted by his guts.

He had the peculiar sensation that somehow the stale, straw landscapes of his mother's farm, the conventions of her life, had woven their spirit into a lot of the words he had selected. They read back to him as convenient, obvious, safe. He was wretchedly disappointed in himself.

His mother's dull devotion to Catholic duty, had been for some time slavish and knowing that his mind was not consistently strong enough to ward against it, Arthur had long suspected that he might not indefinitely escape a similar fate.

He could too easily imagine his future self, driven to breathless prayer directed at a deity that only his fear believed in. This threat of religion filled him with horror and terror, because intuition envisaged that his verse, once so beautifully unencumbered by dread and justification would gnarl then into something ugly or moral.

Both words summoned equal disgust to the pale creature as to him they dwelt within the same seed.

He felt now as though what was happening now might be the beginning of the process. He felt the echos of frustration that would flicker over him like fire unless he did something to prevent it.

It was fresh, novel life and experience that he needed, every experience.

He needed to fill his head and thus his writing until the Lord would not fit.

It was this moment, near the beginning of the day in the Spring of his 17th year that he was struck by a wave of restlessness more desperate and thus more intelligent than those that had preceded it. He simply had to act, to get far away and for good but he realised now that he could not run away, because everytime in the past he had been brought back and to a mother who policed his hours even more.

This was the mood that had led Arthur to send a letter to the decadent Paul Verlaine, great writer of the cities with want to be plucked from his roots.

Within a week Verlaine's reply sat in Arthur Rimbaud's idle writing hand.

He had sent him a train ticket, offered him room and board too, a start in the literary world.

_Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you._

Further on the topic of this enthusiasm, the man promised to plant kisses upon the Rimbaud's hand when he arrived in adoration of the poetry he'd sent him.

Normal men didn't shed such sentiments. Rimbaud knew his mother pious and suspicious of undue attention would be horrified but he relied on that disapproval, built on it in his nerves and imagination until Verlaine's house beckoned irresistibly exotic and special to him. Like the lush, emerald fields of the rain forests that he'd read of in stolen, destroyed books. He had to go at once, instantly, urgently, now. The young man folded the letter, then shred it calmly with intention hard set though every gesture he made to the outside world. Still his external gestures were mute and rare enough to be missed by his bewildered mother who would not know where her son had gone to for some weeks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rimbaud arrives at Verlaine's abode, learns more about his host and sets about manipulating him.

The bright light of daybreak made Rimbaud's spikes of unwashed hair the colour of dry soil when, with the past month's growth aching in his legs, he set off on his lonely hike to the train station.

It would be an arduously long journey to achieve liberty from the dry scrubland of his mother's farm and that of the surrounding neighbours, this much he knew from previous escapes, so as his legs walked his mind was no less active, encouraging him all the way.

The gratitude he felt towards Verlaine manifested as a motivating love.

Alchemistic connections between spirits and nature and other such magical concepts captivated Rimbaud now as much now aged 16 and a half as they had when he was a very little boy. So when a brisk wind flapped around him, seeming to propel him to his destination, he grew easily convinced that it was Verlaine's beckoning touch.

The thought comforted him so much that it made his stiff walk into a fast stride which almost broke out into an even faster run.

As he made into the busy town centre, his mind, preoccupied by it's own voluminous business, leant a vacant, simple look to his iced blue eyes which might have tempted some of his fellow travellers to pick his pockets, if it had seemed at all as if his shabby clothes might have concealed anything. Thankfully though he passed the day unmolested, except by eyes of a few soldiers who my have recognised him from previous days.

After a while of walking amongst people, his own gaze fell upon the proper, pretty girls who walked past him ignorantly, their backs bent straight by corsets, buffered from the world by watery clouds of scent. He remarked to himself upon watching the hoards of them that they were on their way to places that he might never visit, to a life he would never know and the simple thought of this made him wish he could be they so much that he quickly grew jealous.

He almost forgot his own prospective adventure.

He always wanted to be somewhere were he wasn't going to.

 

***

On the train, sometimes rain pattered on the top of his carriage and he heard the muted shrieks of wind pulling it around every so often. It irritated him so in self amusement he attempted to command it all to cease with his will and his mind.

Although this game had seemed at the time like another harmless act of imagination, in time it would seem to have pre-empted the role he imagined for himself in his new mentor's life.

***

Verlaine, upon introduction, had a much more stable, linear life than Rimbaud had thought was possible in tandem with any writing ability - so much had he built the artist in his own image. Verlaine did all he did with a superficial slither of formality, even though it was obvious from the fact that Rimbaud was there at all, that his host was hardly a man of convention.

This artist was nonetheless married, and introduced the dirty boy to his small, child-like wife Mathilde, who inspired the boy's instant antipathy for she had the same dark brown cow eyes and bird like face as his mother. Then in addition she was also, hugely pregnant and yet dressed in a finery that consisted of many skirts of lace, which rather stood out Verlaine's shabby attempts to be well dressed at her side, in his jacket that was rimmed in worn away suede. How she demonstrated her wealth to be far in advance of her husband's Rimbaud didn't like for Verlaine's sense of shame, but more in fact for his own.

Verlaine was deeply embroiled in the social scene of poetry. Desirous of being respected by other writers, his host would attend readings.

A few evenings after Rimbaud's arrival he brought the boy on such a outing, where driven by his own mentality to a fault, in square and diamond rooms full of backwashed smoke and equally spent people, a sober Rimbaud just felt ill at ease.

Disdain shifted a cross through every piece of information that his natural curiosity lifted from his surroundings but the boy poet played along without tantrum of any kind at this early stage.

He showed this pleasingly docile side to Verlaine in the hopes that the other man would take him to heart. He had even dressed for their outing in the way that Paul thought was best and wore a thin sash of black fabric in a bow at his collar, even though he thought it looked ridiculous.

Rimbaud would accept anything to stay there, Paris was too interesting to be sent back. Poetry wrote itself in his brain the very moment the train had pulled into the station. The emotions he felt, amazement, amusement, fear, overwhelmed him such that it would make his art more intense.

It was the dirty streets, people spilling from every dark corner into them to take baths in the rain. The crazy characters who would scream and shout obscenities who endlessly transfixed him as they drove him to agreeing with their ill reasoned rants, or just to wondering what pain had occurred to them to make such sound necessary, almost as often as he flexed back in disgust.

In truth, over the days of observation, the young boy found it scarcely a hardship to exercise tolerance towards the elder poet's clinging to society, because he suspected that it was one foisted upon dear Paul by his young wife and those others like her that he allowed undue influence over him.

This made the precocious creature quiet and unworried because he was sure that he would eventually occupy that role in the other man's life. In fact the more he saw of Paul the more Arthur wanted them to one day be of one mind. Whilst he was sure that at first his work would suffer the influence of Paul, he thought that in time they could come to a point where being together was as good as being alone.

He had faith in everything that he craved, it was the only religion he would willingly submit to.

Scarcely for compromise Rimbaud began to relax and after much urging from his already drunken companion brought the offered absinthe to his lips.

The sour taste of the verdant alcohol spooked over his young tongue powerfully, robbing him of breath and clinging freezingly to the soft tissues in his throat. This seizure nearly made him cough desperately, but he chose not to breath instead. He wouldn't surrender a rasp of weakness to this room or to the company that polluted it, as to be unsophisticated before such bourgeois philistines as the other poet's surrounding them would have caused him death in shame.

The alcohol whipped him hard with instant affect and Rimbaud's body began to burn from the inside, taken by a high fever. As Verlaine's silly speech competed for attention, Arthur blinked, and Verlaine's face seemed as though it hung suspended and undulating before him, just a blank white pane of indeterminate substance with interesting dents. He blinked again and it was gone and Verlaine's eyes became again what they always were, visible, glossy and clear blue without carbuncles or streaks and protected above and below by insipidly pure, thin skin full of veins, stressed cornflower blue from filling that articulated brain of his beneath his balding dome.

Arthur had once read that it was the eyes that revealed the ancient spirit animal that that the Gods had donated to inhabit us. He remembered this now as he gazed at Paul and also how he had read that whilst crouching on an ill-tempered knee which had been banged into blackness by falls with the motley youths in the village whom his mother had forbidden him to take up with.

He clung to that moment and sentiment now for a spell before mentally thumbing his nose at such rubbish.

Romantic bull's shit

Verlaine's body and face, especially his eyes were undoubtedly underwhelming to anyone searching for useless beauty and yet Arthur knew that he was not a man whose spirit was capable of underwhelming him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And so they connect, by that I mean dialogue, erraticness and sexytiems.

"If you were older I should say I aspired to write like you," Verlaine said.

"Older? My age is irrelevant, a triviality, you should know that, you judged your wife of my age as well equipped to serve you as any women twice hers?"

"I did do that once yes, but now I see she is too young." Verlaine returned calmly.

"Ah, so because she lacks in her youth you presume I will too?"

"She scarcely fails me for I've grown to enjoy seeing her try so very hard in order to fail."

"Well don't worry, I refuse to stop at trying. I don't care for idle attempts. If I were your wife, I wouldn't stop until I had made you happy," Rimbaud said with cool directness.

"You wouldn't be the type I chose for a wife unless you could be emptied of your mind. I married Mathilde based solely upon her appearance, for the pleasures of her flesh. Although you quite ably match her for the physical with your fair face and figure."

Rimbaud was silent wondering what such an undue compliment meant, certainly it was a confession of the sexual perversion that had been rumoured, but it also seemed like some insult.

"You shouldn't be the type anyone would chose for a husband," Rimbaud said, "It seems I disrespect Mathilde even more now than I did upon my arrival."

"You don't think she's beautiful?" Verlaine said willfully misunderstanding him.

"I was not referring to that level of disrespect but no, I don't think she is beautiful. Demonstrably I don't believe beauty to be the reserve of external grace. You've read my writings, rhyme is not chief of my concerns because surface is meaningless to me."

"But I found your rhyming to be exquisite, a thing of true beauty." Verlaine said. 

The pink purse of his mouth beneath his moustache, struck Rimbaud as the breaking out of a ghastly self indulgence. "Should I prepare for my hand to be covered with kisses?" He asked sarcastically, intimating his disgust.

"Oh yes, I apologise for that letter, I was most drunk at the time I wrote it and my quarters were populated by a great many friends so that I could not concentrate on sobriety. I regret any undue affection, I'm most sorry if it made you at all afraid to come."

Verlaine's face turned serious with fear and regret as he said this. Now that he had seen the emotion in another's face Rimbaud regretted his revulsion towards him as a relic of his mother's discipline and training. 

Newly enamored he said instead,"I think if I were afraid to come I would be a different person and certainly no kind of artist. If anything, I believe I was looking forward to the kisses most of all" He tried not to appear flirtatious with this comment but was almost aware of it floating free from him.

His interest piqued, Verlaine moved in closer to the table and it seemed as though the incessant buzz of unwelcome noise around them cut out for the young boy, as he replied with an emboldened flirtatious glee.

"And still? Seeing my pathetic wreck of a form would you still welcome them? Is physical grace so disowned by you that you would permit me to kiss you on your face perhaps, instead of the hand?"

"You mean to challenge me?" the young boy asked.

"Oh not necessarily, don't presume that I wasn't just directly curious, I am quite capable of it you know." Verlaine said his sly smile instant, sketching the lewdness of his soul.

"Well in that case it seems scarcely a decent question for me to answer aloud."

"Why?"

"I'm afraid of being provocative."

Rimbaud had been a good boy once, his mother's star student, a person who should not want some immoral conjunction with this man and he knew this was what he should say, given that he had made a mistaken comment and gotten himself something he really shouldn't want.

"Provocation depends on the company, as I am not unknown to you and there is no threat that I would never take anything the wrong way there is no need for worry."

This serious and logical reaction to his largely overacted fear challenged the young man and forced him to continue his protest.

"It could unleash levels of thought that are not strictly needed..." Rimbaud continued, then as he cooly and calmly watched Verlaine back away from his excited perch at the table's edge with a mourning, he found another will inside him, different words, as with a sigh he said.

"I apologise. I always hate my mother's voice emerging from my lungs. No matter how far I get away it is always as though I am her puppet or something equally silly. Here in Paris I should reverse the years of poor behaviour, by the power of the absinthe I should be honest."

Verlaine just smiled in agreement and his face became roguely handsome to the drunken young boy. Handsome and scholarly, as though he were a teacher or the father of a friend regarding him with pride.

"What would your honesty speak if you gave it a tongue?" he prompted.

"It would say yes. My spirit says yes, I want you to kiss me anywhere you would like to kiss me." Arthur felt an ecstasy in the truth that only the innocent and repressed really felt.

"It would be ungentlemanly of me to feel provoked now I assume?"

Rimbaud laughed at this comment and Verlaine continued to speak.

"I'm sure it would, but as you are a treasure, your very presence provokes and moves me deeply. I should not be able to help that as long as I draw breath and have eyes and ears on my head. Although I should not act upon it unless you wish me too."

Rimbaud fidgeted and scratched his head and refused to respond for fear that he had no more words or smiles or things to conceal the truth.

"Two more Absinthes!"

Verlaine said, taking charge of their passage.

Derangement and alien nature all lay beneath the younger boy's grip at a level of contemplation that he had grown used to ignoring. His instincts were acting up and suddenly to lay together with this man beckoned immense and not in a way that was stupid or naive. For the first time it comprised a smart move, one encouraged by drunken energy and courage but one which was desired passionately nonetheless, although not for reasons that the young man could strictly fathom.

At the end of that round, feeling as though the substance had done just enough mangling of his inhibitions to be abandoned he said very suddenly.

"Paul, Paul" This he did very quietly, looking down at his feet at first, then to his tie which his hands played with and spun apart.

The alcohol steadied him then so that he could finally stare ahead with the scarcest contemplation or care for failure and demand.

"We are leaving this fucking place, now!"

The black night hit them in a frigid swathe that made Arthur shiver helplessly. He felt sure he was not afraid but his every sensation was confused by the drunkenness because when the goose pimples on his flesh were smoothed by drawing his threadbare clothes closer to himself he still shuddered just as hard. Air pulled into the cavities of his nose cold and Verlaine insisted upon taking this moment to close in and clap his hand around his shoulder pulling his warm wet being into competition with his renewed shivers.

"I've rented you a room it is best for us both to sleep there tonight."

"You should go home to your wife." Arthur said, his voice rising high, drunkenly buoyant, wanting to test how badly his friend wanted what he did, dimly aware that should he have made a mistake about it, it could get him sent back to Roche.

"To be honest I don't think I should ever go back there. Mathilde see, she doesn't, well, she doesn't allow me into her rooms any longer until the baby comes, she won't miss me. I shouldn't miss her anymore either, for I have you now.... It's just that.... you are the most beautiful writer I've ever known, your language, it's just so unutterably compelling to me."

He ranted all this in a drunken slur as they walked and Arthur pretended not to listen to him when really he was capturing each section of spill, his ignorance gave Paul great ability to vent.

"Your ideas have simply consumed me for the weeks since you wrote and now you are here and the physical reality of you captivates and holds me ever more. You really are beautiful, bewitching, with your eyes of azure and your mouth just so dainty and pretty and alike to Mathilde's..."

Unable to take this entirely silently Arthur pushed a suppressed laugh in two short pants through his nose, humouring his drunken companion. Then, feeling unable to keep it at that as it crystallised like caught smoke in the stretches of his drunken brain that he held the power between them, he began to laugh. Hard and high in volume, hysterically and in Verlaine's face, grabbing his mentor's arm hard as face round and dumb smiled back indulgently bemused.

Arthur couldn't take the hilarity, the firm feeling of pleasure that he got from his dominance, so he fell and sat on the cobbled ground outside the public house. The dirty, earthy smell of shit that he had been protected from by height clouded over his every intake of breath and the depravity and happiness inside him mixed headily.

He would never have to go home again.

Verlaine would never allow it.

Verlaine stood by his side now and he too laughed copiously at his unintentional show. Rimbaud held his leg and wound his eyes up to his friend's face and as he moved his head was shot through by dissolving slats of dizzy pain that he could almost visualise with his eyes open.

Pushing his chest into his friend, his heart rebounding off Verlaine's calf, he said.

"Fuck Paul, help me up would you."

Verlaine lowered a hand to him daintily and took his as softly as he might have taken a young girls. Rimbaud grabbed at him roughly and nearly pulled him from his unsteady balance with his vigor at righting himself.

"Are you ok?" Verlaine asked with a tender amount of concern but all his young companion could do was laugh at him, as the connection between them tugged in a invasive, feintly disturbing way on his insides, starting on his chest and working down into his stomach. He really couldn't talk

"Take me back to our fucking room Paul, just take me back!" he said between gasps of laughs then he said with a sudden catch in his voice "I never want to go home Paul, never send me home ok, I can't" his voice merged into a spiteful refusal, a threat.

Hung by his eyes, neglecting all destiny had planned for him, Verlaine fell into the boy's body and walked on holding him close to him without uttering a word.

Rimbaud knew from there that he was in love.

***

The sound of bustle present during the day had died down to one distant cart horse neighing in the distance, the only sound that marred an eerie silence besides the rustle of their clothes on their bodies.

They had drifted apart, following one another casually as if they had no interest in one another anymore, as if they were sobering up and falling out of a spell. Until in the streets, Rimbaud began to unbutton his shirt. Absent minded at first, then with a compulsive fervor to undress himself so that no confusion was made of his continuing sexual intentions to the other man. A pure and acute arousal had spiraled higher in his body to where it was now in charge of him, making his head a floaty mess full of nothing but the desire to shed his coverings and get down to whatever it would be.

At first Verlaine took his behaviour for amusing exuberance and closed the clasps of his shirt to again with his flat warm hand against the young boy's skin with laughter. Then he felt for himself and observed that his touches just made the blue eyed creature more lustfully wild and eager to take off his clothes. Under the threat that he would cause the boy to shed all his clothes in the streets, a scared Verlaine backed away from the laughing teenager.

They settled again for travelling the coal black cobbles as far apart as Verlaine could manage without Rimbaud becoming perturbed by their separation and leaping on him bodily.

The young man grew steadily menacing with his desire, wrapping the fabric of his bow tight and hard around his fist as though he was throttling something, seeming scarcely able to work his gangly teenaged limbs in the same direction as the man he followed, for his preoccupation with expending the erotic energy that filled him.

Rimbaud seemed to calm when they reached the place, having to focus on climbing the stairs into the small lodging, he asked Paul idle questions about the place but still instantly that he was inside the room and facing a closed door he pulled his shirt off his arms. Then without even looking around he let the sheet of fabric slip down his back.

Verlaine stalked to the boy and pressed a laugh, scalding hot with his lips into a gap between his prominent spinal ridges.

Rimbaud whipped round to the other man at once, his face formed into a fiercesome, starched blanket of disgust, mouth contorted meanly to the other man's softening eyes of lust, his eyes narrowed and darkened, poured scorn on him for such a look of weakness and transparency.

He watched with pleasure as the older man withdrew in terror, just as his sisters had always done when he turned on them for no reason. To watch someone being stupid or confused was always one of his greatest delights. No matter how many times he had frightened his sisters, no matter that they expected him to turn on them, even now they would run away from him just as Verlaine did. It was an act he was constantly adapting and renewing.

Verlaine got to the door and was fumbling with the key to exit, when Rimbaud grabbed his clothes with a fighter's grip. He pulled the other, slightly taller man to him with a power that belied his slight build and shorter stature. Then with hands still tangled in the other's clothes he kissed at Verlaine's cheeks which were covered with prickles of hidden hair with a sensual abandonment for a while. Then his mouth open pushed itself wetly over the older man's cheek to his ear which he bit suddenly but briefly. Arthur enjoyed that sudden upright jerk of response which waved from Verlaine through his own body at the very second he predicted it would and that enjoyment sent itself down in a nosedive to thicken his prick even harder beneath his trousers.

He stretched his body long and full against the other man to overwhelm any desire he might have had to escape with the promise of what was to come but was overall unsure where to touch the other man and sure that he should let the other man take the lead and yet Paul would not take it.

"Paul fuck me". he ordered, just once without the slightest smirk. The other man's hands became more managing and fumbled down beneath the thin fabric of his trousers. Verlaine felt his sex and it sent such a feeling of heaven through his body that he hoped he would never take his hand from it again.

Verlaine slipped his grip over it's tip again and again and as his speed increased the touches came accompanied by the warmth of friction. Realising this might be a problem in time, Verlaine took the hand away to spit into his palm then reaffixed his hand to Rimbaud's member and rubbed it until it stood up between them.

The boy threw back his clear white throat in ecstasy, exposing himself in some vulnerability that seemed more considerable than before, Paul kissed his neck now and Rimbaud muttered in a gasp.

"I can't stand." and pulled him by his clothes over to the bed.

Rimbaud took the moment to pull his trousers down and at an instant his companion was on his knees before him, edging his slender fingers up the poreless alabaster thigh, his gold wedding band gleaming with a single point of shine. With his other hand he gripped the boy's prick and lay it on his tongue.

What Paul did was disgusting, or should have been and because of that it was the purest evidence of divinity that the boy had ever observed. It existed, God did and he knew because he reveled in everything that was contrary to it. His hands sank deep into his love's hair as he, apparently more knowledgeable about the desires of Arthur's body than the boy was, set about licking him into ecstasy. Nature's hand rocked the young boy's hips up in response and he began throwing his erection into the man's open mouth and throat.

The pleasure was thick and he panted to keep from crying out beneath it's onslaught. It rained harder and harder upon him until it snapped Then sprinting, spurting aftershocks seized his hips that made his back arch violently and automatically.

His substance was nearly clear as it splashed accidentally on the older man's cheek and the feeling of accomplishment in viewing it's splatter was as corrupting as he could have hoped. Poetry lyrical and pure traced itself through his quiet head as he listened to his own panting come down and felt the enormous tenderness in his dick as it hung rigid, still settling down.

There was no restriction left to tame him, no God with it's claws into him, only Paul, lovely, dear Paul with one hand dug into his hip, wielding his spit slick cock in his hand, grin wide in his face like a satyr. He paused briefly his mouth in that horrible o, his breath hot all bearing down on him. Then with the younger boy's accommodation Paul rubbed his own slippery phallus into the boy's soft thighs.

Spurts of come like pearls of milk spilt on Arthur's thigh to follow a throaty "Fuck!" and the boy swiped his fingers through it's desecration and swirled in into himself until it was mixed with his flesh like piss in the snow.

"You can't send me away now you have marked me." Verlaine's eyes closed a little and he didn't respond not feeling the tiniest trace of the need to disagree. With a seizing flash of insecurity the boy still alert asked him in a flash of anger and suspicion.

"What, you think my speech juvenile?"

Paul's eyes flipped open at the alarm in his lover's voice, he took his hand and as he did it were as through some transference occurred in his clam body all the others instincts and anxiety rose and pounded strong on him and he rushed to produce reassurance.

"Never should I ever send you away, how could I? Why should you think I might? Where would I go if I did? I shouldn't imagine your mother would be very pleased to see me. Where should you get your inspiration for your work if not for absinthe and Paris and love." as he did this he took his friend's hand that he had clutched and kissed it as though he were kissing a sovereign or the ornaments upon a holy person.

The boy wanted to clap his friend on the back but could not.

How could Paul know that he needed this newness to write, how could he know of the love that fixed itself to every cycle of thought and air pulled in to inflate his lungs, those organs that no longer worked for blocks of script but which now had some sense of purpose.


End file.
